Inside Niantic: From 2010 to Now Into a $770 million business
Startup Type:
Headquarter: San Francisco, USA
Current Status: Active (private; testing and limited deployments in select U.S. cities)
Founders: John Hanke
Founded Year: 2010
Investors: Google, Nintendo, Spark Capital
Funding Raised: $770 million
What Is the business model of Niantic?
Augmented reality mobile game developer best known for Pokémon GO; makes money via in-app purchases and sponsorships/brand partnerships for location-based games
How Niantic got started?
Spun out of Google in 2015, Niantic built on Hanke’s previous AR game Ingress, partnering with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, it launched the smash-hit Pokémon GO in 2016, bringing AR gaming to the mainstream
what growth strategy has Niantic followed?
Leveraged popular IP and nostalgia plus the novelty of AR to get tens of millions of users outdoors catching virtual creatures, built a unique real-world mapping database via user play which became a competitive moat for future AR applications
what are the top products/features of Niantic
Pokémon GO, Ingress Prime, Pikmin Bloom, Niantic Lightship AR developer platform
what was the biggest challenge faced by Niantic?
Maintaining player engagement after the initial craze of Pokémon GO, and technical challenges of operating a location-based game at massive global scale, plus new game launches (like Harry Potter: Wizards Unite) that struggled to replicate success